Actor's Dialects

[Grant Barrett]

> I am interested in the way actors learn an accent for a part in a
> movie or play.

This is strictly anecdotal. As the webmaster for the ADS site, I get a
lot of queries from actors and directors, usually for stage plays,
wanting to know of dialect resources. Over the years, I've done a bit
of digging around so I can offer some ideas when the question arises.

In smaller productions, it seems like the usual method is to listen to
many sound samples by different speakers of the accent needed, and then
imitate them. One British correspondent was doing a production set in
the Catskills, and was looking for some New York accents, working under
the assumption that a New York City accent was close enough. Instead, I
sent her to a list of streaming talk radio stations for upstate New
York (in my definition, beyond bedroom-community distance from NYC),
and recommended she take a long listen to some of those Great
Lakes-area vowels. I think the play concerned the Borscht Belt, so I
recommended Jackie Mason as a guide for how the Jewish New Yorkers from
the Fifties who were taking a holiday away from the city might sound
(only less profane than Mason); I thought she could probably find his
recorded routines in the UK. She said it helped. I dunno.

In some cases, particularly when doing historical accents, the
recommendation that they concentrate on word choice and sentence
structure by studying texts of the period has been well-received, as
long as they understand that people then, as now, don't write exactly
as they speak. Last year someone who was acting in a Lewis and Clark
reenactment said he found my suggestion to study Clark's journals
useful. Clark was an awful speller, tending to write some words
phonetically, giving at least small hints as to how he might have
pronounced certain words. This can also help prevent anachronisms, and
let an actor who is going to have to wing it all day in Ye Olde Village
kind of tourist setting develop some stock phrases and have some
old-timey current events for context (crops, wars, elections, etc.).

I get the impression, however, that it is more common for the smaller
productions just to do a "different" accent. You could make Clark sound
like a modern West Virginian with a bit of television British English
thrown in and most American spectators wouldn't be the wiser.

Larger productions--which never send me such questions--hire voice
coaches and may spend weeks having the actors learn the accents. Actors
I know, however, claim too many of these coaches are hacks who do
ridiculous things such as teach one broad Southern accent, which is I
guess why you tend to get characters supposedly from Texas sounding
like they're from Alabama and vice versa. The women apparently are
often taught just one of two Southern accents: either the
sugar-pie-bless-your-heart or the ah-do-declare. The better actors
spend longer and do more to learn, of course, and may work with several
coaches: one for voice (tone, range, projection), one for
accent/dialect (pronunciation, cadence, even going to far as to make
script suggestions if the coach feels the character would "never say
that"), and another for line delivery (emphasis, emotion).

Stuff I've read elsewhere suggests that Nicole Kidman is a bit of an
accent Zelig, but like acting, not everyone has that ability (or the
motivation, time, or money), so actors and producers and directors
often rely on audience forgiveness, innocence, or ignorance. I heard a
woman on the television show Alias a while back doing a horrific
British accent. It was so cringe-worthy, I could only assume that she
would be unmasked as a mole in a future episode.

I have been told by actors that most of the tapes and books which
profess to teach accents and dialects are only good as a starting
point, and several people have told me they're not really worth the
money. I don't know; I've never used them or heard them. One person
said that finding any role model who has the desired accent, and then
imitating as much of the *person* as possible, within the boundaries of
the current role, is more useful. Again, I dunno.

This doesn't exactly answer your questions, but that's what I have, for
what it's worth. There are probably people on this list who know actual
facts about this, instead of stories, but I'll leave it to them to
speak up.

To close, here is an interesting discussion of language and accent use
in movies, and how badly they are done, with some excellent links
included.

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001053.php

Here are some of the sample sets I often refer people to:

British dialects
http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects/

North American dialects
http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/northamerica.html

Speech Language Archive, many languages
http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/

Slave narratives
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfshtml/

Master page of American English samples
http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US8/REF/samples.html

Cheers,

Grant